Venezuela may geographically be at the top of South America, but they have just dropped to the bottom in beer production. Empresas Polar is the largest private company in Venezuela and just so happens to be the brewery responsible for making Cerveza Polar. Polar makes 80% of the beer that is consumed in Venezuela. As of now, Polar has halted the production of beer in their last four production plans.

Polar did not stop production due to monetary loss, they actually shut down their plant in response to an ongoing feud with Venezuelan government. The Venezuelan government is trying to navigate a time of economic turmoil and energy crisis. Rolling blackouts and a two day work week have been the government’s response thus far.

So why would Polar kick the government while it’s down? Are they a huge corporation hellbent on the plot of a Bond film by taking away beer? Not quite, the government believes Polar is exaggerating their costs in line with the business community and the United States to undermine Venezuelan socialism. The Venezuelan government has since fired back saying they would seize any plants that are not being used and return them to the workforce because it is criminal to waste that resource. I can already picture the first replacement crew running into a Polar brewery scrounging around for left behind brews.

One thing is for sure, this little battle will be over soon. No one can withhold beer for long and get away with it. The people of Venezuela need their national suds to crack open while watching futbol and basketball. Yes, apparently basketball is big in Venezuela, who knew? Wikipedia, that’s who!

Luckily, even with a beer shortage in Venezuela, they still have a natural resource that will hopefully never dry up. Venezuela is actually the most winning country of international beauty pageants. That is a hell of a statistic. To further illustrate how hot these ladies are, Venezuela is the first country to actually have back to back Miss Universe titles. That occurred in 2008 and 2009. So who needs beer when the ladies are hot enough even without beer goggles? Right?

As a side note, while researching this article, I found out that Venezuela is beautiful. I mean… like staggering landscapes. I highly recommend a quick image search on Google. Who knows, you might even find a desktop image that puts you at ease.